Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it

Saturday, 16 January 2016

David BOWIE: Blackstar

(#1068: 15 January 2016, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Blackstar/Tis
A Pity She Was A Whore/Lazarus/Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)/Girl Loves
Me/Dollar Days/I Can’t Give Everything Away

In the
end, it turned out to be a story that began with Frank Sinatra and ended with
David Bowie. The two are said to have met, at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles
during the autumn of 1975; Bowie was recording Station To Station, while Sinatra was working on music of his own –
the Sinatra discography suggests that this was an era of single-only releases.
It is claimed that the two got on well, so well that Sinatra listened to some
of Bowie’s playbacks, in particular his version of “Wild Is The Wind” – always
more Nina Simone than Johnny Mathis – to which the Chairman gave the
thumbs-up.

Even if
the story isn’t verified, I’d like it to be true, to have happened, as it would
represent a midpoint between this tale’s two extremes, a tale that lasted
nearly sixty years, that began with the colourful optimism of Songs For Swingin’ Lovers, one of the earliest
examples of the long-playing record, then an exciting novelty, as a conceptual
thing in itself, and ended with Blackstar, a conceptual record about things
drawing to a close in an age when the long-playing record is essentially facing
extinction.

It therefore
makes sense to bring this story to a close with Bowie’s last words. But you
might be wondering: where have I been?

*

With four
months away, you could assume that I had something to do, and while that’s
true, I’ve also been reading, specifically Jon Savage’s book 1966: The Year The Decade Exploded. On
its surface the book does what it promises, namely document what happened in
that most curious of years as filtered through the year’s pop singles (and to a
lesser extent its albums) and the main socio-political events in Britain and
the USA.

Wisely,
Savage does not attempt to document every last scrap of what happened and what
was done in 1966; in his Introduction he freely admits that if you want to read
about developments in free jazz or Jamaican music, or New York minimalism or
Strasbourg Situationism – to which this reader would add events in South Africa
and Red China – then these form the basis of other books yet to be written.
Likewise, Dylan is a benign spectre throughout the book, as his 1966 doings are
exhaustively documented elsewhere (though it is good to see AMM getting due respect in relation to their influence on the early work of Pink Floyd).

The
Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys are sketched in lightly, as Savage prefers to
focus on the less feted music of that year. The book takes the form of twelve
essays – one for each month – all of which take their lead from a specific
single before broadening out. The first eight essays are devoted to thorough
exploration of specific fields – Vietnam, nuclear war, the rise of feminism and
gay rights, the rise of soul and R&B, etc. – while the last four see all
the disparate elements collide together, not always comfortably (the key word
in the book seems to be “compression” as though pop and youth are fighting for
their lives, trying not to be crushed by the weight of the old). That having
been said, the book’s most compelling chapter might be that on the Velvets and
the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – a tale told countless times, but rarely from
the perspective of the then forty-year-old Andy Warhol (whom Bowie later
portrayed in the movie Basquiat).
Savage considers, at length, what, if anything, this all meant to Warhol.

And yet
the story of 1966 is a rather
melancholy one. 1965 plays a considerable part in the book’s build-up but 1967
is hardly mentioned. Reading Savage’s various accounts – and his account of
1966’s Civil Rights struggles is written well enough to work as a school
textbook. But we are not allowed to forget that 1966 was a year that began with
the Great Society and ended with Governor Reagan shutting California down, that
started with “Day Tripper” but culminated in “Green, Green Grass Of Home” – I
had never before considered how muchthat latter record’s success owed to its status as an unofficial charity
record to commemorate the Aberfan disaster. Pop appeared to be closing down, or
closing ranks, too.

Taken in
conjunction with something like 4-2,
David Thomson’s meticulous ball-by-ball analysis of the 1966 World Cup final,
Savage’s book acts as a useful corrective to the misty-eyed Revolution In The Head stories of 1966
representing a sunny, optimistic time for everyone. In fact, in most places
outside London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and King’s College, Cambridge, it
might as well still have been 1936. It was a miserable and rotten time for most
people and, in the end, perhaps also for pop.

For the
Beatles, Stones etc. appeared to be moving away from their audiences. The daft
optimism of the initial Beat Boom had proved to be unsustainable – and, if you
chance upon a 1964 or 1965 edition of Pick
Of The Pops, it is now mostly unlistenable - as its leading lights drifted
into rest, contemplation, experimentation. Common people did not feel that the
Beatles were speaking to them any more, and yet, paradoxically, in the December
1966 easy listening desert, everybody was waiting for the Beatles to provide an
answer, or signal a way forward.

They did
not – they were busy working on “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,”
neither of which was earmarked for single release at that time – and so the
great promise which “Reach Out, I’ll Be There “ and “Good Vibrations” had
proposed fizzled into nothing. The turning point was probably the Yardbirds’
“Happening Ten Years Time Ago”- and in particular its midpoint, when Jeff Beck
starts his police siren impersonations, which marks the second when British pop
turned into British rock – Jimmy Page’s guitar swoops down like an irritated
pigeon to meet Beck, and you can smell
Led Zeppelin coming in the middle distance (a notion aided by the fact that
Yardbirds bassist Chris Dreja remembers nothing about making the record, and
suggests that John Paul Jones might have played bass).

The single
was a flop, barely scraping into the Top 50. Commentators like Penny Valentine
thought the Yardbirds were jiving, showing contempt for their slow-witted
audience who couldn’t keep up with their daring artistic experiments (whereas
American acts, from the Beach Boys to the Supremes, managed to be more
genuinely experimental and not make a cackling fuss about it). The Stones’
“Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadow” was a mess and
suggested a group that was hopelessly lost, and America, and specifically
California, was picking up the baton again.

By 1967
most of the British musicians who mattered had more or less turned their back
on the single and moved towards albums. Coupled with the ending of pirate
radio, the charts duly and inevitably collapsed into a morass of MoR and
novelty sludge. The year’s biggest new star, Engelbert Humperdinck – to all
intents and purposes a throwback to the pre-rock era – captivated the cloakroom
girls and typing pools who had become confused by the Beatles,had grown up a
little and wanted a less complicated life, while their kid sisters had the
Monkees to scream at and laugh with.

That is a
spurious and superficial overview of a complex and creative year, if you only
base such an analysis on the year’s Top 40 lists. But it may be, as Savage
suggests, that something crucial was lost when the “serious” musicians more or
less abandoned the Top 40; immediacy and concision were sacrificed, as was a
certain degree of excitement and commitment. Although “Readh Out” and “Good
Vibrations” were rightly praised as landmark singles at the time, their
ramifications weren’t or couldn’t be followed through – 1967 was the year of Smiley Smile and The Four Tops On Broadway.

Towards
the end of Savage’s book, and therefore towards the end of 1966, David Bowie
turns up in earnest, having already made a couple of cameo appearances. “The
London Boys” was only a B-side, but unlike much of the year’s pop, it was slow,
contemplative and ambiguous, pointing a softly accusatory finger at the façade
of Swinging London and pill culture. “The first time that you tried a pill,” he
sings, “You felt a little queasy, decidedly ill.”

It sounded
as though the seventies had already begun.

“It’s all gone wrong, but on and
on/The bitter nerve ends never end/I’m falling down.”

* *

In 1966, Savage makes the very subtle point
that, to put it in such words, nothing has changed. Without needing to
underline it, he demonstrates how horribly close the general oppression of 1966
is to now.

And so
David Bowie, coming into and going out of a world that has stayed the same.

* * *

Unlike
everybody else on the planet with foresight, I didn’t buy Blackstar last Friday or indeed over the
weekend; I had other things to do. The first I heard of what had happened was
when I looked at Twitter on Monday morning. Death is what goes on while
youare doing other things, as somebody
else didn’t sing.

It was a
shock, for me perhaps the biggest shock since that misty Oxford Tuesday morning
in December 1980 when I blearily switched on the radio and everything was
Lennon. This is not to say other deaths weren’t shocks; it’s just that with
Elvis, Kurt, Michael, Amy and Whitney you could see it coming. Ornette? He was
my favourite musician of the last hundred years but he was eighty-five; he’d
lived a life.

The only
thing most people knew about Bowie was that he had heart problems and was
living the quiet life. The fact that he died such a mundane death – cancer, at
sixty-nine; what, Bowie? – would not
have been especially shocking to me (though might have been to those devoted
adherents who felt that Bowie was “above” such things); the fact that we didn’t even know is what was shocking.
It was like we hadn’t given him permission to die. It was a Gesamtkunstwerk fait accompli and maybe
simultaneously the noblest and crassest exit in pop history.

As though
Bowie would have been bothered by history, or his story.

Me? I felt
like I had been punched in the stomach.

* * * *

A
Sainsbury’s superstore, my local, on a chilly, damp and dark Monday early
evening. The white light and white heat of the supermarket momentarily dazzle.
I go to the CD section. There is one copy of Blackstar. I pick it up.

“Do right
by him,” warns the voice which has suddenly popped up next to me. “A good time
to announce you’re stopping writing about music, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps I was writing about music in the wrong way,” I ventured.

“You still
are. Endless, ponderous preambles to pretentious writing which does nothing but
state the obvious. No wonder you can’t get any writing work. No wonder no agent
will touch you with a hundred-foot bargepole.”

“I’ve
always said I’m happy to work with a good editor,” I replied. “But nobody’s
interested in publishing literature any more. As for the type of writing I do,
I am fully aware that right now there’s no market for it at all.

‘Furthermore,
I take into account what Mark Sinker said in his Wire review of 1966,
about ‘the boomer’s generation’s seemingly endless ability to reinvest in its
own youth, at the expense of anyone else’s.’ It’s what bothers me about the
Bowie tributes. They’re all, or mostly, about the seventies and eighties Bowie.
Really, if he’d done anything since Let’s
Dance you’d hardly know it. Perhaps they’re just lamenting the loss of
their own youth.”
“And you don’t?”

“It’s why
I wanted to stop writing. It is not befitting of me to complain about baby
boomer music writers running things when I’m days away from turning fifty-two.”

You see, we were evicted from our
flat. No fault of our own, but somebody else bought the building and wanted it
empty to start from scratch. Letters from lawyers using terms like
“trespassing” as though we had committed a crime, other than the fatal early 21st
century crime of being too poor to live in London – when we’re both working
professionals.

We spent two months trying to find
somewhere else and most of the people and places we saw were absolute shits.
The only estate agent we dealt with told us that if we didn’t earn at least
£30K a year we were untermensch. Just what you want to hear when you have
heart problems and need to lead a stress-free life.

Happily – and as usual in such cases,
almost at the last minute – a good, decent and helpful landlord came through
and we found a new flat. But it would be wrong to say that this experience
hasn’t left scars in me, scars which are unlikely to heal. And it has affected
my whole attitude to writing about music.

We are still unpacking boxes. The
other night, most of the old Then
Play Long LPs came to light, and as we
glumly unpacked them I actually wondered: why do we still have all this stuff,
and what did it ever mean outside of writing about them for this blog? To see
them again brought us no joy. Most of them are rubbish. To be truthful, we will
probably end up putting them in the recycling bin; they’re not even worthy of
the local charity shop.

And yet people bought these records in
sufficient quantities to make number one, and so I wonder – have I wasted the
last eight years of my life writing about drivel, and how much more drivel can
I tolerate just to get to the good stuff?

Then I remembered what Jon Savage says
in 1966 about albums being more expensive than singles
and therefore primarily being bought by adults, who have more money and are
therefore more conservative about what they spend their money on. Thus the
album chart has remained an innately conservative affair with only the
occasional irruption of the unexpected.

It is these records – OK Computer, Wu-Tang Forever, To Pimp
A Butterfly, to name but three off the
top of my head – which demand attention. To paraphrase Mr Bangs, I’m not sure
whether I want to see my way towards retirement writing about pap and mud.

If that weren’t bad enough, I fear
that at nearly 52 I may have developed incipient reactionary old git syndrome.
Perhaps that makes for an easier life than actually engaging with what’s
happening now. Or it is simply the case that, as suggested in the current Wire, politics has overtaken music. The world is crumbling to argumentative
pieces and I don’t know that doing an end-of-year list or walking around the
privileged orchard saying “2015’s been a good year” is the way to deal with
that.

Furthermore, after the fifty-three
year irruption that constituted “rock ‘n’ roll,” it seems clear that everything
has simply returned to pre-rock ways, with singers and composers again devolving
into two separate entities. Carly Rae Jepsen’s E-Mo-Tion may be much talked about somewhere – presumably on music messageboards
that I no longer read – but commercially its launch was botched, and while it
is a richly entertaining pop record, the presence of the usual suspects in the
songwriting and production departments suggest it might be the last gasp for
this type of thing (even though, happily, Ms Jepsen does appear to have had some input into all of the record's songs). There are minor tugboats of resistance, like Sophie (like
or dislike PC Music, Sophie crossed into the mainstream via Rebel Heart, a much better album than you think) but
they do their thing and nobody really notices.

Nothing is CHANGED.

* * * *

In the
past week a lot of people have referred to Bowie as a “genius.” As Ian S Munro
made his Glasgow artist say, “It’s not in my working vocabulary and I’ve no
notion how its colours mix.” But you know a genius when you see one. What is a
genius? Let me offer a peremptory and inadequate list: Orson Welles, Virginia
Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Brian Wilson, James Joyce, Sylvie Guillem, Ornette
Coleman, Fred Astaire, Oscar Wilde, Sonny Rollins, Derek Bailey, Roger Federer,
Aretha Franklin, David Lynch, Bill Shankly, Alasdair Gray and Billy Mackenzie.

Yes, I
know, what a pitiful (and overwhelmingly male and white) list. No doubt you can
think of a better one. But that’s the standard of being a genius; you do things
that nobody else would even think of doing, and more often than not you create
art before you think. Throughout his long career, David Bowie never did
anything without thinking about it, without planning it all out (whereas a
Bowie idoliser like Mackenzie at his best sounded and looked like he sang
without doing any thinking), and so
by that yardstick I regret to say that Bowie was not a genius. But he was a
great synthesiser of trends, one of the 20th century’s great art
conduits. Like Diaghilev, Miles and Eno, he was able to link great strands of
development to each other, and responded best when he had a Visconti or Ronson
or Eno to argue back at him.

That was
what I thought until last week, anyway.

Then I
listened to Blackstar and wondered whether he was a genius
after all.

* * * * *

The title
song wanders into earshot, or maybe you wandered into the ballroom halfway
through it. A Spanish mode – it’s in the same key as Coltrane’s “Olé” – Bowie’s
voice sounds rather strangulated, as though struggling to remain above water,
as he sings about the world crumbling to pieces, about death, transfiguration
and rebirth. It is the saddest and lushest sound you could ever hope to hear –
drums stuttering around semi-randomly as though struggling to remember drum n’
bass, Donny McCaslin’s saxophone already causing trouble.

The song
steadily builds up until impact point is reached, whereupon it implodes,
floating freely through space for a short while before the song’s second main
melody steals in – and suddenly we have the old Bowie back; or are these still
ghosts conducting a bitonal argument? They keep trying to break through what is
otherwise the return of the anthemic Hunky
Dory Bowie, but neither side wins and eventually the Spanish mode subtly
returns to the foreground before the whole gently atomises.

If 2013’s The Next Day was a cheerful nostalgic
romp, then “’Tis Pity She Was A Whore” is neither. It is violent – Mark
Guiljana’s drums are mixed firmly upfront – but again, particularly in the
glorious key shift from verse to chorus, which instantly recalls “Absolute
Beginners,” the song gets detoured by McCaslin’s intentionally argumentative
saxophone and flute, as well as some strange keyboard Morse coding at the end.
“Lazarus” sees Bowie regarding “heaven” as a prison – his own Fender guitar
slams in with regular triplets like slamming metal doors – and again drums and
saxophone are prominent; although they begin in a decidedly 1985 mood of
opulent regret (it could almost be Dire Straits or Bryan Ferry), they soon
become more threatening and dissonant. But Bowie’s dissonance or use of free
jazz/contemporary classical tropes – and please
don’t call this a “jazz” record; it isn’t – has never seemed pasted on, like an
exotic chilli. Meanwhile, down at the song’s root, Bowie remarks, “Ain’t that
just like me” like it was still 1964 and John Lee Hooker was playing in
Tooting.

Like his
idol Scott Walker, Bowie’s songs arise out of the voice and lyrical concept,
and then the music has to fit around that or exceed it. It is perhaps not
surprising that Bowie’s vocals on Blackstarare very similar to Walker’s. Clearly
something like Bish Bosch is tougher
going, but Bowie utilises his baritone in very similar ways, making it more
high than low, as though compressing a life’s experience into however long a
song has to be to accommodate it. “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” is a drastic
remake of what appeared on 2014’s Nothing
Has Changed career retrospective. There, Bowie held back against Maria
Schneider’s immense, floating cliffs of brass, allowing McCaslin’s tenor and
Ryan Keberle’s trombone to have their say. The verses are spaced out at long
intervals; there is a particularly fine moment towards the end when Schneider’s
band goes into a ruminative free interlude, with snarling bass trombones acting
as pedal points. The music eventually dissipates, as Schneider’s great hero Gil
Evans was apt to do with his later big bands.

Here,
however, the song gets a violent makeover, the drum n’ bass elements now to the
fore, with guitars clashing and screeching. The song’s length is also
compressed by half and so Bowie’s anger at betrayal is more palpable, less
patient. Who else used a word like “writ” in pop – apart from when Bowie used
it in “Life On Mars?” In addition, his outraged, “You went with that CLOWN!”
recalls the ending of Jazzin’ For Blue
Jean. The song plunges into chaos before being abruptly cut off, like “I
Want You (She’s So Heavy).” After that, “Girl Loves Me” marches aridly on the
spot, and if Bowie knew what he was on about here, at least someone did (I’ve
tried not to analyse the lyrics too much as everybody else is doing that).

* * * * *

I admire
the complete absence of self-pity on this record, unlike entry #1067, which was
nothing but.

Everybody
but EVERYBODY has talked about this record being about his dying, and maybe it
is and maybe it isn’t. But, strangely or normally, it’s not my concern. Both
Tony Visconti and Donny McCaslin have testified that the sessions were bright,
upbeat and to the point.

This
record would have gone to number one anyway,
just like Innuendo did another time.
We mustn’t talk of it as though it were some last will and testament kind of
thing. Nobody speaks of Warren Zevon’s My
Ride’s Here in the same way (but then I suppose Zevon wasn’t Bowie, who was
supposed, in some people’s eyes, to be immortal).

We don’t
celebrate any more. We just sit around and mourn, or wait to mourn.

There is
always the possibility that Bowie was having a laugh, and not just the last
one.

* * * * *
*

I mean,
look at that last photo session; there he is, in the suit, fedora and wiseguy
smile, dancing around why he could almost be FRANK SINATRA

That last
photo session, four months ago.

* * * * *
*

But then
you get something like “Dollar Days,” the one where he treats the English
evergreens like Clive James does the tree in his garden or Dennis Potter did
with his “loveliest, whitest blossoms” and you are drawn back to that heartbreaking
descending chord run as if he were still looking over his shoulder at Colin
Blunstone and Nick Drake*

(*sometimes
I think the deepest Nick Drake songs are the ones he doesn’t sing on, e.g. “Friday,”
whose flautist, Ray Warleigh, died late last year**)

(**that “young”
generation of British or British-based improvisers who came through in the
sixties***)

(***and
the irony of AMM being in part a splinter group from Mike Westbrook’s band,
whose regular players were often to be found in their day jobs in the bands of
Alexis Korner or Georgie Fame**)

(**they’re
all getting old now and dying off, one by one, and it’s happening with the
rockers too, all those people now in their seventies or even eighties, and one
day they’ll be gone and can you baby boomers deal with that?****)

(****and
how do you think that the ORIGINAL rockers, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats
Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis, who invented the game in the first place and have
now outlived most of their disciples, feel?)

but then
there’s something that goes awry with the song, harmonies and improvisations
grow out of step, and he’s telling you something, that he’s trying and dying to
forget you...

...however,
as I said, no self-pity.

* * * * *

“I Can’t
Give Everything Away” and there he is, telling you, against a backdrop as
luscious and subversive as Black Messiah,
and that drum n’ bass he can’t ever forget – well, we know he couldn’t help
thinking about him but now he has a proper saxophonist instead of trying to do
it all himself (“Liza-Jane,” well everyone has to start somewhere; “Subterraneans,”
nobody else could have imagined or played that – McCaslin frequently sounds
like a more perturbed Andy Mackay on this record, whose seven songs all appear
to centre around the same key, like it was one song extending over forty-one
minutes and seventeen seconds).

Another
name for that last song might be “That Would Be Telling.” Guitarist Ben Monder
solos like he’s Mike Oldfield, before the song gracefully glides to a halt,
beside the sea which he was meant to see, but never actually managed to see.

* * * *

Yes, the
blackstar, the meaning of which is known to all good breast surgeons and clinical oncologists.

Yes, the
songs all APPARENTLY/AFTER THE FACT about death.

But I feel
that Blackstar is an
almighty SHOUT IN FAVOUR OF LIFE – he wasn’t intending to die just yet,he had another album on the go, which we may
or may not hear in years to come. I mean, you might as well say that “Oh Mr
Gravedigger” was forecasting what was going to happen etc. etc.

* * *

The
harmonica (though no harmonica player is credited) on “I Can’t Give Everything
Away” straight out of “A New Career In A New Town” and the recorders at the end
of the same song, rescued from “Life On Mars?” Taking stock with a wink, and
telling us: here it is, it’s up to you to work it out.

* *

On TOTP in 1996, excitedly being introduced
by Nicky Campbell, “Hello Spaceboy,” which Bowie performs with the Pet Shop
Boys. He holds his microphone stand at 45°, bobbing and swaying like Starbuck
on the Pequot. The Pet Shop Boys get all the screams and cheers from the
audience, who are presumably wondering who that silly old guy at the front is.

People
these days. Talking about Bowie? You might as well be talking about Al bloody
Jolson. “Oh, my mum likes him.” “Who?” “Do you mean David ZOWIE, you know, ‘House
Every Weekend’?” Meanwhile, of the generations who knew who Bowie was, their
Bowie was invariably the greatest one.

Or maybe
he learned 1966’s most valuable music lesson – ask John Cale, Scott Walker, Bob
Dylan or Neil Young – in that you never stop going forward because nobody told you to stop. Whereas now musicians are told to
stop before they even start.

*

“Space
Oddity” is a song which is almost certainly about Syd Barrett, although the
character “Major Tom” is likely to have been inspired by Brixton music-hall
entertainer Tom Major, whose son John became a Lambeth councillor and later
Prime Minister.

The only
Bowie album without Bowie on the cover, although if you look carefully at the
images at the bottom and see what they spell out, there’s a clue to something
or other.

“Our works in stone, in paint, in
print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but
everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal
ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life;
we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart’ cry the dead artists out of the living
past. Our songs will be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing.”

(Welles)

He was
only seventeen years older than me. You think about these things more the
nearer you get.

And in
between were over six hundred other albums. Or you might prefer to live a life.
And if you do, how long will you play?

20 comments:

You disavow writing about music, then turn around and demonstrate how writing about music can increase our understanding of music and how valuable that can be. Isn't that just like you?

I'm still feeling punched in the gut by Bowie's death and it'll be a while yet before I can listen to this album again, but I'll be rereading this entry when I do. Anything else you decide to write about in the future, music or otherwise, will be more than welcome.

My name is Shai, I'm 21 years old and I'm from Israel. I never wrote here before, because I haven't had the chance - I started reading this blog fairly recently. I just wanted to thank you for all the years of effort you put into the blog, and all excellent writing. I learned a lot from here, and I was really looking forward to seeing you cover the nineties in all of its many facets...

It's a real shame you're stopping. Maybe you should set up a Patreon account? I know I'll try and help, even though I'm quite broke myself.

I understand all your arguments - certainly, the main thing that is terrifying about the Simon Cowell/Louis Walsh albums, and the landfill ones as well, is just how *many* there are (at least there was only one 101 Strings, only one Stars on 45). And as one who once felt an outcast in the place where I still live because I owned 'Wu-Tang Forever' (for all that it crossed over to an element in the indie culture, which probably had something to do with hip-hop's shift away from what they represented) and didn't own the preceding number one albums by the likes of Peter Andre or Reef, I know how it must feel to give yourself some kind of obligation to write about the latter before you get to the former. Almost *wanting* to be punished, *desiring* to be punished - a horrible English trait from which I suffer, and wish I didn't.

I understand what you say about fearing you have become all you see yourself as against, so feeling a need to get off the stage so that others can come through and you do not hold them back. And I can buy the argument that politics has overtaken music, not least because after (and largely inspired by) the genuine mass movement in Scotland we now have proper adversarial politics in England again in a way that mass pop didn't really anticipate (if any music did, I would say Northern English grime).

The thing with IMac is that he can very easily be accused of universalising the liberal-boomer experience - taking it to apply to a much larger section of the population than it actually did - in the way that writers as diametrically opposed in their worldview as S*ndbr**k and Savage/Sinker have criticised recently, but at the same time he acknowledges in his intro to 'Revolution in the Head' that while the old oppressions began to fade from the lives of "the newly classless metropolitan young" round about 1963/4, they "took a decade to begin to disappear elsewhere", and points out in the outro that much of what is considered "the 60s" "actually happened in the early 1970s". So not quite the perception of the latter era as a time when nothing really happened, simply because it seemed a lull from his own perspective, that he may be associated with. And the connections he makes between the mass impulse of 1960s pop culture and Thatcherism are not the sort of thing liberal boomers usually want to hear reflected back at them. There's a big part of him which was actually a traditional conservative, in the sense that he saw (for example) Syd Barrett's allusions to the likes of Kenneth Grahame as a truer tribute to the old culture than latterday Mailism; he had a deep-rooted affection for the old world and was deeply angered by the way that he saw its destroyers posing as its saviours (in that respect, I suspect he's a lot closer to me than he is to you, in terms of having the affection or not in the first place). But I think that in individual parts of and comments within 'Revolution in the Head' he *was* trying to rationalise and overturn his own romanticism, but in the end - sadly - failing. I think to some extent he blamed himself for Thatcherism because of his own divergence from and rejection of the post-war culture; again, it is the desire to be punished and to see yourself as a sinner which I deeply regret having.

Anyway, I must thank you for what you have done, and should you change your mind, and perhaps write selectively and in isolation, I'll be the first person to lend support.

We haven't always seen eye to eye, but I'd still like to say a sincere thank you for writing TPL. You've given me much reading pleasure and I'm sure I'll return many times in the future, not least to see what else you've said about Bowie as I belatedly dive into his catalogue. As someone told me the other day, we always think we have time.

I suggested a while ago that you only do the albums you liked. Clearly, that wasn't the point of the project, but I hope you'll consider writing about the records that inspire you at some point, because those pieces have been genuinely illuminating, and an almost irresistible incitement to listen to stuff even in genres I have zero interest in. Having said that, I also savoured the richly deserved pannings meted out to the atrocious. Overall, the body of work, even if nominally 'incomplete', is a colossal achievement and one you should be very proud of.

First I thank you and Lena for the enormous and outstanding piece of work at TPL that goes a lot farther than just music. And that makes it inevitably indispensable.I've started following TPL only when you were at 1980 and so I read all of the posts until mid December when finally I was able to catch up back to the beginning of the blog. Lots of great writing and analysis, that made me re-think some misconceptions or other ideas that I had for music between 55-79 (not my time most of it, my pop hears started in 78). I had follow your blogs intermittently but TPL was a constant reading(is?will be). As someone who was not that great at writing about music (better in the past with 25-30 years than now for sure) but quit in 2000 due to my daytime job, I think I understand your reasons. Even if different.I think it is fitting that you've finished with Blackstar by Bowie. Bowie, for me, represents probably the best artist that better represented popular music even before his time started. He was amazing, great, controversial, diverse, exciting, risky, disappointing, reflective, enduring, experimentalist and popular. A great man that deserves a big place in history of music. He is/was pop music and TPL's probably most "overall" artist.I would say that this post speaks more of the future than the past (I haven't listened properly to Blackstar due to lack of time so my opinion is just a quick spotify listen that sounded very good). The current state of music, the charts entrenchment in a few macro-niches, the return of the old monocultural singer-songwriter paradigm in pop/rock music. We'll see if the future ain't the same that some are trying it to be, as past in the future.

Once again many thanks for the excellent TPL blog and may the future be with you both in health, work, music and writing. Take care!

Too little and too late, almost certainly, but I have to join the chorus that laments the end of this blog. I started last year, and each new entry was a joy to read. Best wishes, whatever you choose to do now.

Marcello, thanks for all the time and effort you have put into this project. I can understand and respect the reasons you have given for not continuing. It's a pity we won't get to read your thoughts on some of the more worthwhile of the albums to hit the top in the period between 1990 and now, and indeed in the future.

I particularly enjoyed this piece; it's one of the most accessible of all the entries I have read on TPL (probably about 75% of them), and it is well-pitched; I think you get the balance between the album and the man just about right.

Whatever you decide to do in the future, I wish you all the best, prefessinally and personally, and I hope to come across more of your writing for some considerable time yet.

Thanks Marcello & Lena for the wonderful reviews, which, as you had intended, ended up being about so much more than the albums themselves. Really, such a gargantuan task in the end, I thought you could have ended with "Thriller" and it would have been OK.

During the 70s, when everyone from the United Nations down was clamouring for a Beatles reunion to save the world apparently, John said something like "you can still play the old records, if you want to reminisce." Well, we can still read the old blogs too, there's enough in them to revisit many times. Take it easy.